Chapter 4

Nickie’s POV

When Leon told me the board was meeting me tomorrow morning my stomach dropped straight through the floor.

The cold fear from signing the contract turned into something worse. Something shaky and loud and very hard to breathe through.

The next few hours were the closest thing to torture I had ever experienced. Not physical torture. The kind where someone watches you walk across a room and sighs.

“Stop walking like you’re rushing to return library books,” Leon said from across the living room. He wasn’t pacing. He was just standing there, completely still, watching me like I was a problem he was trying to solve. “You are my fiancée. Walk like the floor belongs to you.”

I tried again.

“I’m wearing shoes that cost more than my rent, Leon. It’s hard to look like I own anything when I’m scared of scuffing the marble.”

He made a sound that was not quite a sigh and not quite a groan.

“It’s in your head. Control your head and the rest follows. And smile. Like you are actually happy. Not like something is wrong with your stomach.”

I smiled. My face felt wrong doing it.

“Worse,” he said flatly. “Try again. Think about your dad. Think about him walking out of that hospital. Use that. Just pull it back a little so it doesn’t look like you’re about to cry.”

That actually helped. I didn’t tell him that.

We kept going. I was not allowed to ramble, which was my main way of getting through stressful situations, so that was immediately a problem. He gave me things to say about French literature, which I had skimmed once in second year and remembered almost nothing about. He told me which topics to avoid. He told me that if anyone asked anything personal I should smile, say something small about how much I loved his complexity, and then ask them about wine.

“I don’t know what wine you like,” I said. “Do you even drink wine?”

“No.”

“So I’m supposed to talk about wine you don’t drink to people who do drink it.”

“You’re signaling that you belong in their world. That’s all they want to see.”

I was drowning. I kept trying to make it funny because that was the only other thing I knew how to do when I was scared and he just looked at me every time with that flat steady expression that made it very clear he did not find any of this funny at all.

But we kept going. Hour after hour. And somewhere in the middle of it all the shape of things got clearer. He was trying to build something solid out of chaos and I was the chaos and neither of us had chosen this but here we were.

It was past midnight when I finished going through the list of board members. All names I had only ever seen in financial news. All of them terrifying in different ways.

I looked up and Leon wasn’t in the room.

I found him in his study. Dark room, floor to ceiling books, the kind of space that feels like it was built to keep the rest of the world out. He was slumped forward in his chair with his head resting on his hand and the light from the monitor sitting cold on his face.

The perfect posture was gone.

He just looked tired. Really tired. The kind of tired that doesn’t go away with sleep.

He hadn’t heard me come in. He was just sitting there with whatever he was carrying and I stood in the doorway for a second and felt something I hadn’t expected to feel.

He looked like a person.

I went to the kitchen. Found the kettle after opening four wrong cupboards. Found a herbal blend I recognised from somewhere and made a cup of tea. No sugar. I didn’t know if he took sugar and I wasn’t going to ask.

I put the mug next to his elbow and he jerked awake immediately, eyes sharp, walls back up in less than a second.

“What is this?”

“Chamomile. You looked like you were going to fall asleep on your reports.”

He stared at the mug like it had done something to offend him.

“I don’t drink herbal tea. It’s inefficient.”

“You need to be very efficient tomorrow. So drink the inefficient tea and stop pretending you’re a machine.” I turned for the door. “Good night Leon.”

I didn’t look back. But I slowed down just before the doorway.

He hadn’t touched the keyboard.

He was leaning back in the chair with both hands wrapped around the mug and the steam curling up around his face and his eyes somewhere far away.

He didn’t look happy. But he looked still.

I went to bed.